Posted on 12/28/2003 10:49:51 AM PST by mrustow
Legend has long held that illegal aliens give American citizens cheap lettuce and cheap child care. Excepting for agribusiness and the upper classes, that legend is, in reality, a nightmare, in which the American middle and working classes pay and pay and pay for illegal immigration, and get nothing but grief in return.
In states with heavy illegal alien populations, the budget of a middle-class family is full of hidden illegal alien surcharges. As a result, today’s middle-class American family with two full-time working parents has less discretionary income than its traditional forebear, in which the father alone was breadwinner. (Conditions are that much worse for families torn apart by divorce or the death of a parent.) And things are only getting worse. In California, for example, immigration writer Ed Rubenstein estimates that legal and illegal immigration combine to cost American-born California taxpayers $21.7 billion per year, for a 6.6% annual surcharge. And as Rubenstein points out, legal immigrants also have a voracious appetite for social services: “California immigrant households received a net subsidy from combined federal, state, and local programs averaging $6,145 in 1996.”
Compared to previous generations, middle-class Americans today pay outrageous prices, as a proportion of their incomes, for homes, in order to be able to protect their children from “bad schools.” So say the mother-daughter writing team of Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, and journalist Steve Sailer.
In Warren and Tyagi’s new book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, they write that "The brunt of the price increases has fallen on families with children. Data from the Federal Reserve show that [after inflation] the median home value for the average childless individual increased by 23 percent between 1983 and 1998 … For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 79 percent—more than three times faster."
And yet, the white American working class can only dream of such headaches. For its members, home ownership - in any neighborhood - is increasingly an impossible dream. And when economists talk about what illegal immigration costs the typical American worker, the averages (see below) include millions of workers who have been locked out of entire industries by employers who refuse to hire Americans, or by illegal immigrant workers who will not tolerate Americans in their midst. This is the ugly truth behind the propaganda of immigration enthusiasts, who insist that illegal aliens are doing "Jobs that Americans won't do."
In 1968, Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act (aka Title VII), which mandated teaching Hispanic children in Spanish and English, which in practice has meant in Spanish only. (The BEA was officially “eliminated” by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, yet NCLB did not eliminate bilingual education, which radical U.S. Department of Education officials force more aggressively than ever on the public schools.)
In states buffeted by high levels of illegal immigration, including the entire American Southwest, Florida, New York, and Illinois, the public schools are being inundated by unassimilable, illegal immigrants and the children of illegal immigrants, including foreign street gangs. Such schools are typically dominated by incompetent, racist, Hispanic (in Florida, often by Haitian) nationalists at the staff, faculty, and administrative level, who increasingly dispense with the teaching of English. And the foreign nationalist “educators” get paid more than do their English-speaking counterparts!
In California, which has approximately four million illegal immigrants (out of 9 million-13 million nationally), illegal immigrants have destroyed a public school system that for generations was the envy of the nation. For middle-class, American parents to leave their children in such hostile environments would constitute neglect. And so, while some parents have placed their children in often expensive private schools, others have sought safe public school districts. Realtors have cashed in. Thus must middle-class Americans pay exorbitant taxes to maintain public schools from which they have been disenfranchised, or buy overpriced homes, while people who are here illegally use the schools for free.
Throughout the American Southwest, public and private hospitals alike face the prospect of shutting down, because of the onslaught of illegal immigrants. State and local laws prohibit hospital emergency rooms from turning away any patient, based on his inability to pay, or from inquiring into a patient’s citizenship status. Exploiting such laws, illegal immigrants use emergency rooms for primary medical care, including for the common cold, so as to get out of paying for their care. Meanwhile, American patients with real medical emergencies, whose taxes maintain those hospitals and who pay for their own medical care, are turned away.
News reports tell of Californians with medical emergencies who are forced to drive from hospital to hospital, since facilities close their emergency rooms to new patients as early as noontime. Bizarrely, such reports never mention the role of illegal immigration in causing the medical crisis. Instead, one hears only of “uninsured” patients, amid suggestions that the system needs massive transfusions of tax dollars, and that America needs European or Canadian-style socialized (“universal”) health care. None of the stories this reporter has seen, has told of illegal aliens ever being turned away from medical facilities, no matter how trivial their complaint. Thus are Americans disenfranchised by the very medical system they pay so much to maintain.
And Americans pay higher auto insurance rates, to make up for illegal aliens who drive illegally and without insurance, and cause accidents.
Illegal immigrants’ defrauding of California’s generous welfare system has long been a scandal. Such welfare fraud is now a national scandal, as state and local governments operating stealth amnesty programs violate the Constitution, in negotiating directly with Mexico and other foreign governments, to accept the “matricula consular,” an insecure form of ID used exclusively by illegal aliens, and in issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Illegals may then use either the matricula consular or state driver’s licence to receive welfare benefits from officials who are not permitted to ask an applicant his citizenship status. Meanwhile, a driver’s license can be used to illegally register to vote.
Increasing numbers of states are following New York’s example, and granting in-state tuition to illegal aliens, at the same time that they charge law-abiding, American citizens from other states two and three times the in-state rate. And as illegal aliens are taking the initiative, suing colleges in Virginia for the right to break the law, illegals in the other states will surely follow suit. Thus do those who, as a matter of law, have no civil rights, demand and receive such rights at the expense of Americans, who are robbed of theirs. Meanwhile, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.) seeks to make the lawsuits moot, as his DREAM Act would repeal the federal law prohibiting the granting of in-state tuition to illegals.
Again, it is the citizens who must pay for the illegals. And via affirmative action, unqualified, illegal college applicants are admitted ahead of qualified Americans, foreclosing on the already limited opportunities for the children of the white, working poor to improve their lot. (A multitude of programs exist for such children's black and Hispanic counterparts.)
But that isn’t the half of it. As columnist Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, unqualified immigrants – including illegals – enjoy affirmative action privileges, in getting jobs in place of qualified, American citizens.
It is no wonder that for years, Americans have been fleeing California, whose population has been buoyed exclusively through incoming illegal immigrants.
But flight is just a stopgap. Today, California; tomorrow, Idaho.
As economist George Borjas has shown, America’s immigration policy costs every American worker an average of $2,578 in annual income, in the form of depressed wages, in addition to all the hidden surcharges I listed above. And with every stealth amnesty, more illegals stream across America’s borders to all her states. And as the unfortunate American residents of far-flung Lewiston, Maine have learned, the federal government is inviting foreigners to come here LEGALLY, to partake of welfare programs that disenfranchised Americans must pay for.
Finally, as Steve Sailer has reported, illegal immigration is disenfranchising Americans through the unconstitutional creation of “rotten boroughs,” in which only a small portion of the populace may legally vote. Rotten boroughs arise because congressional districts are created based on numbers of “residents,” rather than citizens.
Unlike the wealthy liberals who support every sort of handout for immigrants, Middle Americans who actually have to work for a living, cannot afford an unlimited number of hidden, illegal immigration taxes and surcharges. Like the classic science fiction movie, the current situation could be called, Invasion of the Citizen Snatchers. Or simply, as in the title of Michelle Malkin’s book, Invasion.
ARTICULO 40.- Los mexicanos que por cualquier causa hayan perdido su nacionalidad, para entrar al país o para seguir residiendo en él, deberán cumplir con lo que la Ley establece para los extranjeros.
ARTICULO 41.- Los extranjeros podrán internarse legalmente en el país de acuerdo con las siguientes calidades:
a).- No Inmigrante.
b).- Inmigrante.
ARTICULO 42.- No Inmigrante en el extranjero que con permiso de la Secretaría de Gobernación se interna en el país temporalmente, dentro de alguna de las siguientes características:
I.- TURISTA.- Con fines de recreo o salud, para actividades artísticas, culturales o deportivas, no remuneradas ni lucrativas, con temporalidad máxima de seis meses improrrogables.
II.- TRANSMIGRANTE.- En tránsito hacia otro país y que podrá permanecer en territorio nacional hasta por treinta días.
III.- VISITANTE.- Para dedicarse al ejercicio de alguna actividad lucrativa o no, siempre que sea licita y honesta, con autorización para permanecer en el país hasta por seis meses, prorrogables por una sola vez por igual temporalidad, excepto si durante su estancia vive de sus recursos traídos del extranjero, de las rentas que éstos produzcan o de cualquier ingreso proveniente del exterior, o para actividades científicas, técnicas, artística, deportivas o similares, en que podrán concederse dos prórrogas más.
IV.- CONSEJERO.- Para asistir a asambleas o sesiones de consejo de administración de empresas o para prestarles asesoría y realizar temporalmente funciones propias de sus facultades. Esta autorización será hasta por seis meses, improrrogable, con permiso de entradas y salidas múltiples y la estancia dentro del país en cada ocasión sólo podrá ser hasta de treinta días improrrogables.
V.- AISLADO POLITICO.- Para proteger su libertad o su vida de persecuciones políticas en su país de origen, autorizado por el tiempo que la Secretaría de Gobernación juzgue conveniente, atendiendo a las circunstancias que en cada caso concurra. Si el asilado político viola las leyes nacionales, sin perjuicio de las sanciones que por ello le sean aplicables, perderá su característica migratoria, y la misma Secretaría le podrá otorgar la calidad que juzgue conveniente para continuar su legal estancia en el país. Asimismo, si el asilado político se ausenta del país, perderá todo derecho a regresar en esta calidad migratoria, salvo que haya salido con permiso de la propia Dependencia.
VI.- ESTUDIANTE.- Para iniciar, completar o perfeccionar estudios en planteles educativos o instituciones oficiales o particulares incorporados o con autorización oficial, con prórrogas anuales y con autorización para permanecer en el país sólo el tiempo que duren sus estudios y el que sea necesario para obtener la documentación final escolar respectiva, pudiendo ausentarse del país, cada año, hasta por 120 días en total.
VII.- VISITANTE DISTINGUIDO.- En casos especiales, de manera excepcional podrán otorgarse permisos de cortesía para internarse y residir en el país, hasta por seis meses, a investigadores, científicos o humanistas de prestigio internacional, periodistas o a otras personas prominentes. La Secretaría de Gobernación podrá renovar estos permisos cuando lo estime pertinente.
VIII.- VISITANTES LOCALES.- Las autoridades de Migración podrán autorizar a los extranjeros a que visiten puertos marítimos o ciudades fronterizas sin que su permanencia exceda de tres días.
IX.- VISITATE PROVISIONAL.- La Secretaría de Gobernación podrá autorizar como excepción hasta por 30 días, el desembarco provisional de extranjeras que lleguen a puertos de mar o aeropuertos con servicio internacional, cuya documentación carezca de algún requisito secundario. En estos casos deberán constituir depósito o fianza que garantice su regreso al país de procedencia, de su nacionalidad o de su origen, si no cumplen el requisito en el plazo concedido.
Another kind of model this is happening to has been in medicine. HMOs created a middle man between the doctor and the patient that needs to be paid. Made medicine get worse rather than better IMO!
Same thing with this layer of illegal aliens in our society.
But left to their own devices, weren't doctors bankrupting health care insurers?
Point taken.
"G" word? Let 'em sue me. (If this were DU, I'm sure my account would be suspended.)
I don't think the DU suspension would kick in, if you were the correct race.
Thanks for that observation; that hadn't occurred to me.
We don't need one -- the laws are all already on the books! WE simply (or perhaps not so simply) need to support immigration reform candidates at the polls.
Plus we now have programs like so-called bilingual education, which actively PREVENT immigrants and their children from learning English, and activist judges who refuse to permit business owners to run English-language workplaces. Everything militates against assimilation.
Gee. That might be a consideration, but the police where I work cant get them to stop stabbing each other long enough to ask them to fill out citizen papers.
HERE's A BETTER IDEA. Have them return to their country of origin and fill out the correct paperwork to begin with.
(By butting in line, they are in effect stomping on the face of all good and decent people who are trying to come here legally.
And make sure they are disease free, non criminals who really want to assimilate into American life instead of just taking advantage of our lenient legal system in order to get over.
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